Zooming User Interface

A Zooming User Interface or ZUI is a graphic environment and a radical but fairly evolutionary outgrowth of the graphical user interface, or GUI. A ZUI can represent different levels of scale and detail, and the user can change the scale of the viewed area in order to show more detail.

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In Zooming user interfaces information elements are not displayed within windows, but are placed instead directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually in vectorial form, as vector graphics). Users navigate through the virtual space by panning left to right and up and down, as when one uses a video camera, and by zooming into objects of interest, as when one uses the zoom function in a video camera. At one point in the zooming process, an object of interest can look like a small speck, at another point it can look like a thumbnail of a page of text, and at still another point it can look like a normal size page, or a magnification of such a page.

Related Topics:
Desktop - Vector graphics

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The longest running effort at a ZUI has been over the Pad++ project started by Ken Perlin and Ben Bederson at New York University and continued at University of New Mexico. After Pad++, Bederson developed Jazz and later Piccolo at the University of Maryland, College Park, which is still actively being developed in Java and C#. More recent ZUI efforts include Archy by Jef Raskin, and the simple ZUI in the Squeak Smalltalk programming environment and language. Squeak is open source software.

Related Topics:
Ken Perlin - New York University - University of New Mexico - University of Maryland, College Park - Archy - Jef Raskin - Squeak - Smalltalk - Open source software

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The ZUI is a new interface paradigm that is receiving the most attention and effort in the contest to come up with a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI. However, since the total amount of investment in building a successor to the present GUI is rather small, the effort in developing ZUIs is proportionately modest. Each year, a great economic effort is invested on making small changes to existing GUIs (in desktop format or within Web delivery), while far less money is spent on significantly new interfaces, and even less is spent developing ZUIs.

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